For more than 600 years England's medieval monarchs – many of them better known for their belligerence than their scholarship – collected illuminated manuscripts, which were among their most treasured possessions. The signs are that they read them, too, and gazed at their pictures. And now those pages, glowing gold, vermilion and lapis lazuli blue as vividly as when the kings first set eyes on them, are going on display in an exhibition at the British Library in London.

A miniature of a crowned man and a kneeling man both holding a book, assumed to depict the presentation of the book to Henry V as Prince of Wales Public Domain

It is a remarkable collection: 154 of the books are on display from a collection of more than 2,000, collected by kings from Athelstan, who described himself as the first king of Britain in the mid-10th century, to Henry VIII. That they have survived in excellent condition is largely due to the fact that George II donated many of them to the nation in 1757 and more came from a collection gathered by his grandson, George III. Their successor, the Queen, is touring the exhibition on Thursday.

Scot McKendrick, head of history and classics at the library, who has curated the exhibition, said: "These manuscripts are our best way of connecting with the Middle Ages. There is a great deal of fuss when bodies are excavated and analysed down to the contents of their stomachs, but these books have so much more to tell us about the monarchs and their lives."

It is likely that the kings themselves, and their queens and offspring, handled the books on display. One of the earliest, Athelstan's copy of the Gospels, dating from the early 10th century and possibly inscribed at Lindisfarne, has a note on one page describing the king's release of a slave named Eadhelm after his coronation in 925.

Nearby are manuscripts of history books bought by Edward IV 550 years later and almost certainly read to his sons, who became the princes in the Tower and did not live long enough to benefit from the king's instructions in 1473 that they "should be read … suche noble stories as behoveth a prince to understand and knowe". What is known is that the royal accounts show their father paying £250 for books in the 1470s. Not that medieval monarchs always bought their collections: sometimes they looted them, as in the case of a book in the exhibition that was captured with its owner the king of France, Jean II, at the battle of Poitiers in 1356. Sometimes the hand-inscribed and illustrated manuscripts were so long in the making that their intended recipients died, in which case their names and coats of arms could be scratched out and painted over.

The range of manuscripts is wide: bestiaries and bibles, prayer books and propaganda, histories and stories, many lavishly illustrated. A Christmas Eve present given to the nine-year-old Henry VI in 1429 contains 38 full-page illustrations and 1,200 other pictures in the margins. There is a book of instructions, in English, advising how a prince should behave, given to Henry V while he was acting as regent for his father, Henry IV, in 1410; there are prayer books belonging to queens such as Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI's wife, and Cardinal Wolsey's bible, containing margin jottings relating to his master Henry VIII's divorce.

As extraordinary as any is a route map, drawn by the Benedictine monk Matthew Paris in about 1250, detailing the best way to get from London to Jerusalem – all the more remarkable because the monk only once left England and that was to travel to Denmark. Almost as detailed as a modern satnav route, it outlines how long the journey between towns is likely to take and sites of interest.

• Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination at the British Library, 11 November to 13 March

• This article was amended on 11 November 2011. The original referred to queens such as Margaret Beaufort, Henry VI's wife. This has been corrected.